Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
August 2009
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Roads not taken

So many places, and so little time.

When I was growing up we used to go for family holidays and drives, and a typical activity would be “let’s see where THAT road goes”. Sometimes the results were dull, other times interesting or exciting, and on one occasion we came out in someone’s backyard. Oops!

I am not sure […]

New favourite places

Add St Patricks Head and Halls Falls to my list of Favourite Places (again, note the careful attention to omitting apostrophes (do you think I can blame the nomenclature board for contributing to the decline in levels of literacy? (but I digress))).

Since the day dawned gloriously, and I knew it might be quite a while before […]

Small towns

I think I have been in the big city too long. This weekend’s trip has provided some striking reminders about the realities and fragilities of small town life. I had a lengthy chat to the hosts of my B&B in St Marys, and they highlighted the great sense of community that exists in such towns, but […]

Travels on the East Coast

I’ve had a fun day.

It started in a very leisurely fashion, since the rain had started up again overnight thus reducing my sense of urgency for heading off. The rain was accompanied by low grey clouds, which meant that my planned ascent of St Patricks* Head—the main reason for my visit to St Marys*—had to be […]

Quirks 3

1. I had a “throw-back”/deja-vu moment last night when I came out of the movie theatre into an only partly familiar, cold, dark, half-deserted carpark. The atmosphere—the cold, the darkness, the emptiness, and the fact that there was a certain indefinable aroma in the weather—took me back to Newfoundland. It didn’t trigger a particular place or […]

100 words

It’s embarrassing to confess that I spent over an hour this morning writing a mere 100 words. I had to write an abstract (potted summary) of a paper that has been accepted into a maths education journal, and it was hard work getting a nice clear succinct digest of the earth-shattering brilliance that awaits the reader […]

Happy chaos

It has become a family tradition to get together for dinner on Sunday night if you’re in the vicinity and free. Tonight it was here at Mum and Dad’s place (it alternates between here and Colin and Wendy’s place), and it’s always fun and slightly chaotic with kids (and adults) everywhere. Tonight Mum (grandma) had four […]

Tasman Peninsula

Mum, Dad and I went for a drive down to the Tasman Peninsula today, despite the somewhat gloomy weather forecast. It’s been at least 8 years since I’ve been all the way down in that direction, and there were a few places I was looking forward to visiting again.

We stopped at Eaglehawk Neck to visit an […]

Cliches 2

If you are the hero of a fantasy novel, then your parents must be dead or absent.

Harry Potter (Harry Potter books): dead parents, raised by uncaring (though not truly evil) aunt and uncle.
Garion (Belgariad went-on-far-too-long series): dead parents, raised by extremely distant great grandparents whose roles as such are not revealed to him for quite some […]

Cliches 1

Isn’t it funny how geeky boy science students don’t seem to have changed in 25 years?! Most of the science buildings on the UTas campus are clustered together, and when I wandered down that way yesterday there was a group of nerdy males conversing, looking just like the nerdy males I remember from my own uni […]